the L2 extension clearly shows that they are considering a farside landing mission for the future, for which a relay at the L2 would be almost necessary. in fact, are there any hint of the extension of the unmanned Chang'e program beyond CE-6?

Really! That's unexpected, and very interesting. What are the objectives of these maneuvers, Yeh? I'm guessing navigation practice and additional systems testing.

According to the report, it is for "verification of navigation/control technique of the Chang'e 5 mission".

Re Paolo -- interesting, I am seeing discussion on 9ifly.cn (a forum comparable to unmannedspaceflight.com in China) that also speculating that Chang'e 5 or 6 may be targeting the far side of the Moon. There are some calculations that seems to conclude that it is possible to achieve this with CZ5 launch system. Link (in Chinese): http://bbs.9ifly.cn/forum.php?mod=viewthre...ge=19#pid331129

I have not heard of any extension. Conceivably Chang'E 4 could be targeted to the far side, becoming the first landing ever in that hemisphere.

THAT WOULD BE SO AWESOME. Even more awesome would be if they could send Chang'e 5 there. That would catapult the Chang'e program from following in the footsteps of past exploration to performing next steps beyond what anybody has done before.

But they targeted Chang'e 3 based on Chang'e 1 and 2 high-res imaging of the landing site. They wouldn't have high-res imaging of the far side, would they? Of course there is all the American and Japanese data to work with...

Chang'E 2 only obtained the very high resolution images of its landing area around Sinus Iridum. Originally I thought that limited missions 4, 5 and 6 to that area, probably two rovers and then two sample returns in the two very distinct mare units.

Since then there have been rumors that the next landing site and the first sample return might be in Oceanus Procellarum (my guess: in the youngest mare basalt region south of Aristarchus Plateau). Now we hear about the far side. It would be a great thing to do, but I can't imagine it being the first sample return. So maybe that's a more suitable destination for Chang'E 6.

in early January 2015 the service module will leave the Earth-Moon L2 point of flying to the moon; the middle of recent months, brake, forming lunar orbit; February, March each conduct a lunar orbit rendezvous and docking Remote Pilot test; April-to-Moon imaging, shooting preset sampling landing zone topography.

CE-5-T1 left EM-L2 at around 15:00 UTC on Jan. 4 and is scheduled to reach lunar orbit by mid-January. As of midnight UTC on Jan. 5 the spacecraft is 445000 km from Earth and 57000 km from the Moon.

Earlier reports state that it will do at least 2 things in lunar orbit. In February and March it will perform 2 "virtual target" rendezvous tests for the future CE-5 mission (not unlike how the Shuttle did "dummy rendezvous" tests in the 1980s). In April the small monitoring camera will be used to obtain higher resolution photos of CE-5's landing zone.

And CE-5-T1 has entered lunar orbit yesterday at around 19:00 UTC - initial orbit is 200 x 5300 km with period of 8 hours. It will make 2 more burns over the next 2 days to lower its orbit to a 200 km circular one with period of 127 minutes.

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